That’s all he ever dreamed, really. To climb up in the big ol’ truck and sit in that leather air-ride seat and put his hands on the big steering wheel and shift that thirteen speed like a man, just once.

And I said, “John, that’s a shitty dream.”

When I was young, I wanted to fly in space and see the stars, all of them, and maybe see if I could figure out what’s all this talk about God.

Shit, John, I drove a truck and damn near froze to death one hundred and twenty miles north of Thunder Bay Canada. Minus forty-one degrees. The coldest I’ve ever been.

The best gift I ever received was a thermos of coffee that tow truck driver brought me. And that Canadian boy had some big balls coming out for me, and when I thanked him, he just said “I wasn’t doing much else today…”

My fuel filters all froze up, water in the diesel. Damn near lost my right foot to frostbite that trip.

I broke a drive shaft in a wind-whipped and freezing rain snowstorm blocking the upper entrance to the George Washington Bridge. I had to call a welder friend of mine to drive eighty miles through that mess. When he finally got to me, he said he wouldn’t lay in the slop and snow, so I had to weld it. I think I had eight million people pissed off at me that night.

Then there was that girl Loralie, always broke and hustling drinks at the bar. A pretty, skinny girl. She was married, I was told, something she never confirmed or denied. I knew she lived with some guy. He sold heroin and coke and weed. I hated him, for reasons lost to me. I was no better a man than he was.

Sometimes when I was back off the road and didn’t want to go home, I’d park my tractor out back Turf’s bar and sometimes Loralie, she’d stay in the sleeper with me. When we got tired of pretending we were in love, we’d sit in the cab and look out the dirty windshield at the hookers and dopers doing hooker and doper stuff in the cars parked next to us. Laughing and making up stories about the characters and the weird little show playing out before us.

Sometimes I’d take her with me on short trips, like a load of tangerines into Boston or pulling onions into Toronto. She was the DJ, fiddling with the radio dials. She smiled and laughed when the hundred-thousand pounds of us hit a pothole and the whole rig shuddered and shook.

I didn’t know she had a kid. I suppose I should have figured she did, or asked. I was kind of single-minded in those days, John. I didn’t ask a lot of questions or pay close attention. I was just tired of being alone; I suppose. Loralie, she was good company. We laughed a lot, and she had a pretty warm smile, and I liked her dirty blond hair and her skinny face with her big green eyes.

One night up near Montreal, we got stuck in the worst white-out blizzard I ever lived through. Loralie, she was crying because she had to get home to her kid. Her mom was watching the boy while she ran with me. I swear to God I ran that three hundred miles in the low range and riding that clutch to get her home.

When I got back to the shop, me and this other kid, we pulled that tranny, there wasn’t shit left of that clutch. The guy I worked for was pissed at me, but I figured it was just his turn to be pissed at me. It seemed like every day was somebody’s turn to be pissed off at me, except Loralie. She was never pissed at me. Even if I gave her a reason to be.

Then one night, I got home to the bar, and she was nowhere to be found. I just figured she went back to her man or her kid, and I was sad, but I didn’t cry or any of that shit. I just got good and drunk, and the next day took another load, Detroit, as I recall. It’s kind of hard to remember. Those days and the towns all run into a blur. I think I liked the blur. I must have. I lived in it long enough.

One night, late ‘78, I think maybe August, I was out back of Turf’s smoking a joint and hanging with the hookers and dopers. I was ribbing and jiving, watching some of the bar girls in short sweaty dresses and tank-tops dancing with bottles of warm beer and cigarettes in their hands, out under the streetlights on that old railroad cinder parking lot.

This girl Patty, Loralie’s friend, runs up to me. I could tell she’d been crying, and she handed me one of those little square photo booth pictures of Loralie and she told me she was dead from the cancer.

I didn’t even know she was sick, but again, I didn’t always bother to ask. I told Patty I figured she’d just went back to her man. Patty said, “Loralie told me she never laughed so much in her life than with you, and she died in a lot of pain, and she said she was glad for the time you guys got to spend and she was glad you didn’t see her die. But she asked that I make sure to find you and give you this photo and ask you to not forget her.”

I took it and looked at her little face in the black and white square that seemed to smile through anything, poverty and drug dealer husbands and life at Turf’s and all the glory that encompassed…

And I was so goddamned sad.

I handed the joint I was smoking to someone and walked into the bar to get a drink.

Somebody was playing Don Williams Good Ol’ Boys Like Me on that Wurlitzer jukebox, gawky and loud. A few couples were trying to slow drunk dance to the song.

I ordered a shot of tequila and a bottle of Rolling Rock beer.

I drank both fast and motioned for another round, drank that, threw the empty bottle and shot glass at the mirror behind the cash register.

Jack, the bartender, ducked fast, and in the dim lights behind the rows of bottles of watered down and cheap booze the shards of glass and what beer remained sparkled for about a half second, and I remember thinking it was pretty. And it reminded me of the stars I wanted to see and that as a boy I wanted to fly in space but settled for that truck and this bar instead.

I reached out for the nameless slob nearest me, and I started to land head shots and a couple of good punches to his face. Then I realized it was some kid named Ronnie, too drunk to fight back. I was lucky. Ronnie would have beat my ass if he wasn’t half passed out drunk and high.

Jack grabbed me by my grimy t-shirt and threw my ass out onto the hard concrete and yelled I’d better let the night air cool me off.

I walked to the tractor, climbed in, sat there and cried and when I stopped crying, I headed out to find another load, but I’d never felt so far away from anything as I did sitting behind that big steering wheel.

That was my last time in Turfs, and I parked the tractor.

I heard the old Don Williams song for the first time in so many years, John. It took me on a journey that landed me right here, writing this to you.

So, that’s about all I know about trucking, but it ain’t like any of those cowboy songs that I ever heard.

New Year’s Eve is haunted, or it haunts me. Which way it works, I’m really not sure. Out of the cobwebs crawl the names and faces. None ever forgotten, but at times pushed to the background as life’s busyness demanded my attention.

It’s a day of reaffirmation and atonement. Not so much nostalgia as a reckoning. The specters come out as the early afternoon sun drops behind the hills to sit with me, until the room in the dim light seems full. They all just want to once again simply be. They don’t come in anger or judgment; they want nothing from me but acknowledgment they existed; we existed.

I’m reminded now how much I’ve skated and slid through the passage of years until now I come to face my crimes. Some, then, in my chemical coma, amused me, but now chill me in terror.

Once again, I ask myself the question I’ve asked for decades: why did I escape, when so many others got what was fully deserved?

How many times I’ve stood before the casket, wishing I knew how to pray for souls and answers, but feeling nothing but the rush of the close call, the dodged bullet, the next in a long line of escapes to make Houdini proud. How many times I’ve morphed and adapted to be whatever I decided to be and left these boys, loyal soldiers and brave volunteers in the wake of my madness? In how many ways am I no better than the generals who hide far from the fight, I condemn for their egos and bloodlust.

I can’t offer an apology to these ghosts who sit before because me, I don’t think they hear me. They sit in the sullen solitude with me, and I feel a very large piece of me has died as each one them has died until nothing of the energetic young criminal I was once remains, all that remains is me. An empty vessel full of remembrance that wakes at three in the morning, and after that is rarely allowed to fall back to sleep.

I’ll sit in congress with my ghosts again this New Year’s Eve and ponder again why I’ve escaped their fate. Knowing I’m not more worthy or gifted, simply lucky. Blessed or cursed my entire life with dumb luck and escaping a half step ahead of what chases me. I’ll sit with them now and wonder when my luck finally runs out and I join them, and I’m asked to account and confess my sins, what will I say to explain my betrayal.

Christmas 1965 will always stand out in my mind as the best and saddest yet somehow closest to perfect Christmas of my life.

My father died in April that year and I started to hate everyone and everything, in no particular order.
Ma and I were never close, and we both decided to, at best, survive our relationship, not unlike, I’m sure, people brace seconds before the impact of a train wreck.

In many regards that was a perfect picture of who we were, a dysfunctional wreck. We both did the mechanical things a relationship requires to function, something like how a cam shaft and a crank shaft work together, performing different jobs independently but mechanically lashed to each other. It was always, at best a functional relationship.

It snowed heavily that Christmas Eve day, and that made me feel all the more isolated and angry and alone in the little stone house down by the swamp my dad insisted was a lake. It was not, not a lake by any stretch, except in his mind, I suppose. I don’t think it qualified as a lake by any definition, except, perhaps, it involved a relatively large ponding of water.

I watched out the front window as the snow worked to pile up on his lake until it disappeared from view. I watched a big buck deer plod through the thick white frozen drifts until it got too close to the stream that drained the swamp, where the ice was soft and thin. With great thrashing and sprays of icy water I watched the helpless animal break through and fight to free itself from the entanglement of the weeds and grasses and sharp and thicker ice, wailing at times that hollow bellow a stag will make in a fight. I watched it’s last fight and heard it’s final howl as It finally went under the water, dead.

I put on my red and black plaid coat and rubber boots and walked the quarter mile through the snow and ice. At times the dead and brittle grasses that poked up through the frozen water line would trip me and I’d land face first in the white and wet frozen mess. I came to the spot where the buck went under and down a foot or two below the surface, I saw the violence of his final bout. The water churned muddy, and red. Bloody hoof prints covered the snow and the sharp shards of ice that cut him where he tried to free himself from the swamp’s death grip. I figured he bled out and drowned.

I felt strangely envious of the deer. I looked down past the man-made wood and stone dam that made this mudhole something more than a wide stream, and dreamed of building a boat, or stealing one, to one day sail away from that dead man’s house and his goddamned lake.

The night began to fall and the cold rushed in even quicker. As the gray day became the gray night, I could see Christmas trees in the windows of a couple of the few houses that surrounded this frozen pond. Including the front window of our closest neighbor, Mrs. McCabe, an old, widowed woman I’d been scamming for home-baked cookies since I was old enough to walk. I didn’t give a fuck about trees and lights and mythical men in red suits or mythical babies in mangers, I wanted no part of any of it that this night. I went back to my house, slipping in through the back door in silence, where my mother and me retreated to neutral corners to try and survive this cold and wet and wretched Christmas Eve.

I remember sitting in the dark, up in the attic, the safest place I knew to be alone, comforted and tormented by boxes of my fathers’ clothes, not yet ready to be thrown out or donated. My house was haunted. I wrapped my knees with my arms and rocked myself slowly, listening for and hoping for a word with the ghost, but none came, and I found myself just hoping the night would end.

Resenting the words of the of songs I heard on the small, staticky AM radio in the kitchen as they lifted up the small and dark stairwell to my safe place. Songs of peace and comfort and joy. Holly and pine wreathes and red bows and white Christmases, and silver bells.

I thought about the now dead deer and how I envied him and admired his thrashing fight. I thought about the stream and my escape. I was not sure where I’d sail, but I’d go anywhere to escape my father’s goddamned swamp.

I heard a knock on the front door. I ran into my sister’s empty and darkened room. Ten years older than me, she’d left that year. Looking out her window, I saw it was snowing harder. The world an ugly collage of grays and whites. There were no streetlights on our dead-end road. We didn’t have an address; we were just RD#3. Middletown, NY. We might have had one of those new Zip Codes by then. If we did, I didn’t know what it was. I figured the mailman knew where we lived and that was be good enough for everyone, and I didn’t care because I knew I no longer lived there. I just survived there and suffered the nights like this one.

The noise at the door was Mrs. McCabe. I was summoned to join her and my mother. The old woman had walked down from her house up near the main road the thousand feet or so from her door to ours in this heavy snow. She stood in the small front room, wearing her deceased husbands’ heavy railroaders’ jacket, and big black wet boots and a thin cotton house dress.

She carried with her a heavy, woven wicker basket with a lid wrapped in a blanket that was covered with snow, now melting on the floor.

Mrs McCabe apologized almost meekly for not coming by since the death of my father and offered the basket to my mother, saying, “You both need this.”

She turned for the door and offered a shy “Merry Christmas.” She paused and looked around the house realizing perhaps she’d mis-spoken.

In the basket was a loaf of fresh baked bread and a small tub of butter.

Ma and me, we sat in the tiny dark kitchen and listened to the staticky radio, it carols making a mockery of this night. The wind had picked up and wet snowflakes slapped against the glass panes of the back door.

We drank black coffee and ate the good, warm bread in a silent communion and listened to the windswept storm.

I’m not saying the bread fixed anything, some shit is too broken to ever fix. But it was the first moment in almost a year I felt anything that didn’t feel like hate.

In all my life I’ve never known a greater kindness than old Mrs. McCabe and that loaf of bread.

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Dear Christmas,

Two weeks into all this noise, and to be truthful, the decorations and stuff are bugging me. Clutter pisses me off and distracts me. It’s all looking ratty. I do like the lights, but that’s about it. If it was up to me, we could put up lights in October and leave them up until the sun comes back, but the rest of this I can do without.

Speaking of lights, what’s with these series style lights that die on the tree when it’s just one damn bulb that burns out? It’s almost 2024 for Christ’s sake. In 1960, with my dad and his sets of ten lights apiece, it was fun and amusing to watch him find the bad bulb; these big cheap sets with one or two hundred lights each is just a pain in the ass.

Gift shopping is just an absurdity. Does anyone actually shop anymore, or do they just click and ship? All year long, I buy shit. I’ve got crap I’ll never use up or wear out. I don’t need anything except car parts. If you want to buy me a gift, I know a great pick and pull junkyard. Otherwise, please click and ship to someone else.

The year-old kitten is adorable, but she’s Hell-bent on tearing down any trees and decorations. It’s like her mission. I’m thinking of knocking all this stuff down and letting her have a little party. The older kitten, Tilly, had never seen you either, until last year. Tilly is as good as the kitten, Ethyl, is bad. Yes, Ethyl and Tilly. I think you need to be over fifty to get the side-splitting humor in that. At the very least you must have spent days home from school sick, on the couch, watching I Love Lucy reruns. Do they still run “I Love Lucy” They should. Lucy was hilarious.

The best part of you used to be back at the lake. The big kids would collect all your trees and drag them over the ice to this tiny island in the middle of the frozen swamp. Then we’d have a blazing bonfire where we’d all get drunk on whisky stolen from our parents and the boys would coerce the girls off into the woods and try to get laid. I’m sure I know some people, who are now in their fifties who were a direct result of the Great Silver Lake Post Christmas Bonfires. So, thinking about it, my favorite part of you was always watching your trees turn to sparks and head for the sky. And the next day when the great conflagration was over and all that remained was torched and blackened branches.

People still have Covid, the flu or RSV this year. Going to a party is still sketchy. At least the grandboy doesn’t have Covid this year. He cheers me up. So does my daughter. Yesterday was her birthday. We spoke a bit about sobriety and gratitude yesterday, and how many of us don’t get to know the gift of getting old. I’ve not always been the best father in the world, I hope I have made up for my wild years.

Imagine if we took all the money and time and effort, we spent on tchotchke that will be lost, broken or forgotten by the Wednesday after Christmas and sent that to Saint Jude’s Children’s Hospital so they could fight cancer in kids or food pantries so the seventeen million children in this country who go to bed hungry every night went to sleep with full bellies.

Oh, and something about Jesus, but the significance of him and this season is somehow lost on me.

My daughter is right. I am like old man Potter in “It’s A Wonderful Life,” but truthfully, as this world gets more complex and confusing every day, The Christmas Season totally baffles me.

Love, Bill

Da Ace…

Nick called me up on a Friday night and said he needed a ride to Newburgh Toyota, Saturday morning.

A little confused, I asked, “What car do you have at Newburgh Toyota?”

He said, “I got no car there. They have free donuts and coffee and papers and TV. You just walk in and sit down like you belong there. Nobody says a word. What are they going to do, throw us out? Me, and Frankie Boy were there this morning. Good coffee!”

We were at the new Yankee Stadium about a year after it opened. The new stadium is designed so that you can go to the concession stands near your seat and still see the game live, unlike the old ballpark. Tables and chairs face the field with a great unobstructed view.

Nick would often have these moments of complete brilliance. His face lit up, literally like a light bulb went off in his brain.

Eying the surroundings, eating a hotdog, and seizing on an opportunity, he looked at me, “We can buy cheap seats, like the bleachers, sit there for an inning, and then move around to these free seats in front of the food. Best seats in the joint. What are going to do, throw us out?”

The little victories were the best victories.

Driving through Boston, during a hot pennant race, in a Yankee blue van, with Yankee colors and decals on the sides and back, we were wondering why everyone – everyone – was flipping us the finger and yelling “Yankees suck!” Nick, looking out the passenger window wondering what their problem was…

He got us a job once building a deck for this nice, widowed woman in Newburgh. He told her it would be about five-hundred dollars in labor. The deck was on the second floor, as ass-breaking job. It took the better part of the summer.

I think I may have made a dollar an hour, but Da Ace thought it was a good deal. She made us lunch and brought us iced tea almost every day. When we were finally done, he said and I was bitching about the summer wasted he said, “Yeah, but now you know how to build a deck! Besides now I can get us other jobs like that…”

All my crimes committed with Da Ace seemed innocent and forgivable crimes, we ran under the radar and laughing, maybe never fully aware of how much fun we had, until now, looking back. I was pissed off at him at least half the time, but what was I going to do, throw him out?”

It ain’t never going to be the same again, man…